Let’s Design a Game #10 The Agents

Currently there are 48 agents in the game. Agents are used to pass skill checks for contracts and act as a way to boost die rolls.

Agent Card

Each agent has one of three skills. Those skills are Planning, Execution and Get Away. They also have a roll effect. Roll effects are used whenever a player rolls a die and they want to boost a poor roll. In the top left corner, each agent has a cost. The cost of each agent is the amount of money a player will receive when one of their agents is used in a mission/contract and they are successful.

Pending Mission

Agents are used to pass skill checks and in the example above, you can see that the base level skill checks for this region are 5 Planning, 4 Execution and 5 Get Away. Add to the base level the checks required for the card and you end up with a total skill required of 8 Planning, 7 Execution and 8 Get Away.

Agents On A Mission

Let’s assume these are the agents that have been accepted by the contract owner and they are about to attempt the mission. Each agent will roll a die, add their skill, combine that with the roll and skill of any other agents working with them for that particular skill. If this total is larger than the skill check required, the skill check is passed. If all the skill checks are passed and the mission is a success.

Mission Rolls

The six agents on this missions rolled really well and rolled an 18 Planning, 13 Execution and 12 Get Away. The contract owner would reveal who they were to collect the reward and the contract owner would then have to pay all the agents in the mission. In this case, the contract owner would have to pay $40K in agent costs. Some of the agents could have been their own but this was an expensive mission. There were a lot of dice rolled and the chances of the mission being successful were high, but that comes at a cost. You can try to use few agents to lower the cost, but risk the mission failing.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me. I know the explanation is fragmented, but I want to divvy out the game in pieces as not to throw out too much at one time and give people a chance to digest the pieces as they are released.

If you have any comments or questions, leave a comment here or email Chris at c.renshall.tgik.games@gmail.com

If you have made it this far, would you like to go a little farther? We have a regular Google hangout with other designers. We talk about the games we are working on and share helpful tips and ideas on how to make designing our game easier. We meetup every other Saturday. Either comment here or tweet me or email me and I will add you to the list and send you a link to the Google hangout.